My Gift to Myself on My 30th Birthday - How I hope art will save my life.

I’ve always been a bit of a wild child. Mixed race, both sensitive and strong, patient and hot tempered, practical and whimsical… I straddle the line of a lot of identities. But I always knew for sure I’d wanted to make beautiful things. My creativity and imagination were always my strongest skills.

Growing up, writing came easy to me. Language just seemed to click. But I was enraptured by Art however it manifested. Whether it was theatre or architecture or fashion, I thought beauty made the world that much more livable in the face of all the challenges. I dedicated myself to helping make it happen. In my 20s, I organized literally hundreds of events. Book signings, stage shows, even a few festivals. I never would quite settle down. I was always flitting between one thing and the next… Always learning some new skill and brushing up against but never really sure what I really wanted. One instance stands out to me… the summer I organized my first art installation.

It was a simple idea. Put on a fundraiser for the festival we were organizing, something to help folks get a taste of what we were all about. I took the lead in planning, since my co-organizer was busy with the festival end.

It ended up being beyond anything I could have imagined.

I can’t describe to you the feeling of wonder when you spend your whole life putting others at the forefront and running around behind the scenes to make sure it all goes well. I can’t describe what it’s like to have a vision, a dream of something magical and stirring and watch it come to life around you. And I can’t begin to express what it’s like to have others share and delight in it too.

Over the course of 6 weeks, we took a large black warehouse room and turned it from emptiness to a glittering world. We made a fairytale forest, a creature museum, and an underground treasure lair filled with art, sculpture, costumes, and characters for visitors to explore. It was a huge success. It was a feeling I’d never had before… Instead of searching for the next beautiful thing, I was standing still. But it came to an end and I moved on to attend to the details of life, the next event, the next organizing committee.

Along with being creative, I’ve always been kind of techie so it makes sense that I’d become fascination with bitcoin and cryptocurrency when I first heard about them in 2013. I moved cities and changed jobs. I watched the first bitcoin ATM go up and even attended the first CoinFest with a few games I’d made in Twine. Unfortunately, I soon got really sick.

I’d been overworked and burnt out on community work for a long time and my best guess is it all caught up to me. I would lose whole parts of the day, only to snap out of it and find the bathroom faucet running and food half cooked. I couldn’t remember things from one moment to the next, feeling like my sense of time and self was slipping through my fingers. I started to get lost just a few blocks from my apartment. I remember standing on the sidewalk staring at the house numbers and realizing with horror that I couldn’t place them in my mind, that I couldn’t figure out which way I needed to go. It was TERRIFYING.

I can't express what it's like to be in a new city, on your own, and not be able to trust your own mind. I visited doctors and therapists. Their best guess was dangerously low iron (that affects abstract thinking and memory) coupled with too much stress for too long. I was wholly dissatisfied with the answer. After all, low iron seems like such a small thing to make me doubt my own mind. But my doctor assured me, it was serious. Low iron affects the blood cells and how oxygen gets to your brain. Someone with too low iron for too long can kill brain cells. I later had a friend confide in me that she had had to have a blood transfusion to deal with a similar condition that almost killed her. I was shocked.

Over time and with patience (and lots of supplements!), I managed to adjust to the new way my brain was working. I wrote things down a lot more and could tell when I’d been overworked by how well I remembered things. I slowly became a part of my community again and took on lots of organizing responsibility, falling back into my old patterns of finding meaning through service to community. I loved being plugged in again!

I never really got “better” but I was managing… Until last December…

I had a beautiful home, 3 wonderful pets, lots of friends and even more responsibilities. I had a job I liked and it all came crashing down. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened. It was like dominoes.

I got sick again. My energy and memory started failing me and the more I rested, the more anxiety I felt about things not getting done. I had so many responsibilities I couldn’t keep up. I had spread myself so thin that one by one, everything tumbled. I had to quit my job because I couldn’t always leave the house. Even though it broke my heart, I had to rehome my beloved pets with friends I knew would take care of them properly to ensure my safety. I had to give up organizing and in a way, most of my social life. It was 2013 all over again and I was devastated. I didn’t know if I had the strength to go through it all again.

MY MISTAKE

I was lucky that I had built up good connections with people and one of my dear friends invited me to stay in her home, rent-free for a few months. I tried to figure out what I was going to do. My health had gotten so bad I was using a cane most days just to stay upright.

I was so frustrated.. But as I let all the bustle of life die away and tuned in to myself, I realized my mistake.

2013 had been a warning. I hadn’t listened. I had worked myself so hard under so much stress that my body couldn’t keep up and it had given out. And when I was starting to get better, I had spent the next few years trying to put my life back together the way it was before. But that was a mistake. The way I had been living was not sustainable and here I was suffering the consequences yet again. I hadn’t changed the way I was living, only tried to force myself back up to maximum productivity. If I truly wanted to thrive once again, I’d have to re-imagine my life completely.

That was just over 6 months ago. I just passed my 30th birthday on July 21st. It was a hard one because I’m still building up my life again and it’s difficult not to think about all I’ve lost. But I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted for the future. The last few years has taught me that there are no guarantees. When I look back at my life, instead of thinking how productive I was or how many organizations I worked with, I want to know that I made myself happy. And looking back, I realized the happiest, most energetic I’ve been was that summer I did my art installation. I knew in that moment I’d found the thing where all of my talents came together to make something beautiful. I also felt an important piece to go along with that was the joy I’d felt at creating games before I got sick and the possibilities of pairing them with cryptocurrency.

For my 30th birthday, I gave myself the gift of starting over and becoming a game designer. It’s going to take a lot of work. Coding can be hard to learn and illness has messed up my memory and concentration. But I’m going to take the time because I believe that after everything, my most important goal should be fulfilling as many of my dreams as possible. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?